IPC APAC

Our mission is to further the competitive excellence and financial success of our members. Salesforce enables us to excel in the delivery of this mission and improve the experience of our members.”

Sydney Xiao | PRESIDENT, IPC ASIA
 

20%

CAGR in membership activities

 

IPC APAC uses Salesforce to grow and connect with members

Founded in 1957, IPC is a global electronics industry association which represents companies involved in all aspects of electronics, including printed board manufacturers, EMS companies and OEMs. IPC helps its more than 5,600 member-company sites achieve competitive excellence and financial success by setting industry standards and providing services like training and certification as well as public policy advocacy.

Within Asia Pacific, IPC is also focused on expanding its membership base to support a larger part of the electronics industry. It's using Salesforce to drive this growth and strengthen relationships with  its 1,400 members locally.

"Our mission is to further the competitive excellence and financial success of our members. Salesforce enables us to excel in the delivery of this mission and improve the experience of our members," said Sydney Xiao, President for IPC Asia.

Modeling best practices

To help members succeed, IPC APAC must perform at its best, and it first turned to Salesforce to simplify ordering processes and improve productivity. Its previous process of signing up members was overly complicated and an obstacle to growth. The main issue stemmed from the fact that companies typically purchase standards, training and certification at the same time as their membership. So for every potential new member, customer service reps would need to sort through IPC's extensive product catalogue, identify the appropriate products, and calculate the cost. The process ultimately slowed down fulfillment and impacted the member experience.

"We needed a more efficient process for quoting and fulfilling orders as well as a better way of managing customer data and contracts," said Xiao.  "Salesforce provided a solution for all of this and we can now build quotes 60% faster with only a few clicks required to add in the right products, along with terms and conditions. We've also set up automatic reminders to let members know when memberships are due for renewal. All of these things involved significant manual work in the past and now the automation makes it easy."

IPC APAC has also found value in the powerful reporting provided by Salesforce. It allows the team to examine operational data in almost unlimited combinations and share insights with others in an easy to understand format.

Building new relationships

By using Sales Cloud to streamline quoting and improve the ease of processes like course scheduling, IPC APAC has achieved significant gains in productivity over the last few years while improving service. The Association is much more scalable as a result and has begun using Pardot to improve lead nurturing and grow its membership base.

"We realised there was more we could be doing with Salesforce, and so we brought on Pardot to increase engagement with leads from events and digital marketing campaigns," said Xiao. "Pardot has additionally provided an opportunity to do more analysis of our marketing activities and see which campaigns and events deliver the most value."

IPC APAC was able to implement Pardot itself, using Trailhead  for step-by-step instructions  for  activities like building campaigns. It also received support from the Salesforce Success Cloud team who shared first-hand knowledge and resources like whitepapers on Pardot and introduced IPC to other  customers who had been successful using the solution. "We found working with the Success Cloud team very valuable and it has led to us building relationships and learning from other customers using Pardot," said Xiao.

IPC APAC is now using Pardot to manage everything from setting up landing pages and capturing lead details through to lead scoring and nurturing. Pardot also provides customer service reps with more information to understand and prioritise leads. For example, reps can see where leads have come in from, and know which topics they're most interested in. This eliminates the need for cold calls and has contributed to an increase in lead conversion from around 18% to 26% in less than one year.

"We've increased lead generation and shortened the conversion cycle. We've also increased our net promoter score to 50 which we attribute to knowing our customers really well and improving our engagement and  service," said Xiao.

Increasing growth and renewals

IPC APAC has experienced continuous growth since first implementing Salesforce. Over the past three years, IPC APAC membership, training and certification activities have been growing at a CAGR of 20% without increasing the size of the customer service team. Member satisfaction has increased by 10%. The Association plans to build on these results with a focus on improving value proposition to support members and increasing renewals. It has engaged the Salesforce Success Cloud team for support and advice on achieving these goals and enhancing the customer lifecycle.

Additional initiatives planned include greater use of analytics and an online community where  members can communicate and share their experiences. Already, IPC APAC is improving communication amongst its employees using Chatter, which makes it much easier to share information across offices in different countries and helps team members collaborate to answer customer questions. In addition, the APAC team has started to use Salesforce Quip this year, which allows team members to seamlessly collaborate on cross functional projects.

"Everything we're doing is with the purpose of serving our members better. In the coming years we expect that more of our decisions will be based on data and we'll continue to excel in developing valuable programs and improving member experiences," said Xiao.

 
 

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